I've been trying really hard to achieve a specific table spaced effect in
the current CSS2 table model, but working the current definition with
captions present and cell backgrounds filled seem near impossible.
So, I'm questioning the interpretation of border-spacing. If I'm not
entirely mistaken, border-spacing is applied along the outer border of cells
touching the table edge in addition to spacing the table-internal cell
borders. But this causes a gap between the edges of the outermost cells and
the surrounding anonymous box that cannot be bridged with current CSS
properties. This means that edges of backgrounds drawn behind the cells and
the caption can't both be aligned with the surrounding anonymous box edge.
Consequently any filled-in table cell backgrounds will hang towards the
inside of the normal margin established by the anonymous block box even when
we've set table {width:100%}. This is highly undesirable as filled-in cell
backgrounds become pretty much unusable in any table with
border-collapse:separate and border-spacing!=0. I suspect the border-spacing
property should not be applied along the outer edge of the outermost cells
in the table, since this way the outermost cell edges would coincide with
the table edge, keeping the interpretation of table geometry more in line
with what people expect. Should this be incorporated in the current list of
CSS2 errata?
The second point concerns empty-cells:show when the cells have no content.
This has with good probability been discussed before, but isn't the cell
background being drawn when empty-cells is set to show? The newest Mozilla
does not appear to draw the backgrounds, and this causes some nasty trouble
with empty table cells if it's truly meant to work this way. Is this a
problem with Mozilla or with CSS2? Ian?
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy, mailto:decoy@iki.fi, gsm: +358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front